A bunch of us (14+, mostly IO) went as a mob to a small design exhibition in Rotterdam this past Saturday. It seemed to be very focused on jewelry – droog design had a small exhibit, but it was stuff I had already seen in Amsterdam. Also some other familiar chairs and furniture from Dutch Design Week showcase.

I’m not sure for whom the exhibit was, possibly more targeted at a wealthier crowd who would actually consider buying products this expensive.

I grabbed the floor plan for Art Rotterdam, but it was getting late and we went out for food at the New York Hotel Restaurant that even served “American Cheesecake.” I ordered a side of sourdough bread, but whatever I got clearly was not sourdough. Cry.

art rotterdam album

I went back the next day to see Art Rotterdam, this time it was just me and Lu, a Taiwanese girl who is studying DFI (Design for Interaction). While we had expected it to be bigger due to the larger number of corporate sponsors in comparison to Object Rotterdam, I severely underestimated the task of looking through the 75 galleries were there (including some from London, New York, Milan, etc.). Clearly Art was the Big Mama event, not Object.

At first I didn’t take any pictures, because of that general rule of not taking pictures at art museums or other events, but then I think the rule seemed to be universally bent when it came to 3-D works rather than 2-D. Still, I marked down a bunch of names and will post what pieces I can find at the end.

So there was a lot of works to look at, but not a lot of it was mind-shattering nor was it even stuff I liked. That’s the thing about art-ish events: I like going to them, but I don’t often like or am affected by what’s there. Perhaps finding the couple things that strike you is worth the couple hours of indifference.

But there were three things that I was reminded that I prefer in general or for when I ever have my own exhibition:

1) Interaction – I like being able to touch products and play with things. A lady showed us how to control the dimming of a gold lamp by just touching it, and after I was testing to see how it worked for 5 seconds she was like “Okay, well don’t play with it now.” Rubbish. When I make my Nauseo coffeemaker, everyone can have a cup.

2) Photographs – People should be able to take them. If the real value is from the actual interaction experience, they’ll buy it. There’s no real harm in having photographs taken of it.

3) Stories – It’s important for me to know where a piece of work comes from. However when under bombardment and overstimulation as was the case here, it turns into more of an eye-catching or first impression game. Lu was much better than me at looking at everything more attentively and catching things I didn’t the first time around.

Then it took us 3 hours to get home, because there was a power failure and no trains were leaving Rotterdam (it usually takes 20 minutes). In short, we tried to find a bus, found the real station under construction, then found out the bus wasn’t running that day, then went to take the light rail to Den Haag (past Delft) to catch a train to go to Delft. Whoops.

Michael Wolf - Pictures of Chicago. Urban pictures of windows aren't very new, but seeing it in large scale was somehow very nice.

Joe Deutch - This made me laugh out loud.

Boukje Janssen - A mirror book with text on a transparent sheet regarding the necessity of suffering in human existence. (borrowed from website)

Carolein Smit - couldn't find original, but this one is nice too.

Ruprecht von Kaufmann - It feels like a part of a story, but there was no description.

Because I have a lot of photos from this past weekend, I’m trying out the facebook album approach. (There are three, click the links above.)

Yoshi, Robin, Hiro (Yoshi’s friend visiting from Japan), and I had an excursion to Germany to look at some museums and “get inspiration.” Places we visited were Zollverein (renovated coal mine now art scene) in Essen, the cathedral and museums in Köln/Cologne (Kolumba, Museum of Applied Art, and Museum Ludwig), and briefly Düsseldorf. Food culturally, I had me some German beer, sausage, pretzel, and berliner.

Travel disasters were kept to a relative minimum. We had a slightly unpleasant encounter with a cab driver who took us to another hostel of the same name in another town at 2AM after we overshot our stop on the train. There was obviously lots of walking, and lots of climbing (we scaled the dom tower [509 steps, supposedly], our first hostel was on a hill in the middle of the woods, and we stayed on the 5th floor in our second hostel).

The red dot design museum at Zollverein had a lot of stuff to look at and play with (the more fun part!). Kolumba had a really interesting space, unfortunately I didn’t know anything about the pieces since I couldn’t read German. The Museum of Applied Art was a random find, but the design exhibit was rather awesome and the presentation was much more digestible than the first museum. Museum Ludwig had many Picasso pieces, a sweet audio bar installation, and had a lot more that I’m not mentioning.

I mourned the fact that museums do not like to open on Mondays. I stalked the chocolate museum in Köln at night to compensate. (… I was so close to it without knowing it earlier on Sunday! I was really sad.) Thank goodness for glass.

And when I got home I was really happy to be on a bike. My mind was refreshed, but my feet were quite dead.